UNSCRIPTED
The Los Angeles Times lit into the Army's missile-defense tests on Tuesday in an article claiming a "top Pentagon official is casting new doubt on the progress" of the technology--just three weeks after it successfully downing a target missile outside the atmosphere. The article goes on to quote Philip E. Coyle, "a sort of quality-control official for the Pentagon," as saying the recent test was "highly scripted." What's more, says the article, Coyle believes "more realistic tests should be conducted before the project moves from the prototype-development stage to engineering of the final system." Last week, the Pentagon announced that the Army's Theater High Altitude Area Defense system would skip a final test and move into the engineering phase.

The L.A. Times did not in fact speak to Coyle, but simply describes an interview Defense Week conducted with him. And now Coyle says that although Defense Week accurately reported his sentiments, "some derivative articles have not." He clearly means the L.A. Times.

NR has obtained an internal memo by Coyle saying he supports canceling the THAAD's next test flight, plus the decision "to begin engineering the new design." What's more, writes Coyle, the THAAD "tests were important, necessary, and valuable, and were not 'cooked' or 'rigged.'"

MAN OF THE CENTURY
In the current issue of Time, novelist Tom Wolfe nominates Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as "Person of the Century." An excerpt: "No individual in all of history. Completely on his own, using only the power of one, has changed the lives of more people than Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. ... [He] survived eight years in prison camps and three years of internal exile and and, in secret, wrote The Gulag Archipelago, revealing for the first time the existence of this chain ('archipelago') of death mills. The moment the manuscript of the book's first volume was smuggled out of Russia and published in France in 1973, it was as if a stake had been driven through the heart of Marxism."